Congressional Memo; After Bad Week, G.O.P. Looks to Budget for Help

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A Democratic filibuster killed regulatory legislation in the Senate. Republicans from both houses admitted they had given up on enacting a line-item veto this year. It became clear that the Republicans could not agree on a broad strategy to oppose affirmative action policies, the senators remained split on welfare and even in the more conservative House Republicans gave up on killing public broadcasting and legal services for the poor.

But should a liberal optimist, or a conservative pessimist, think for a moment that the Republican wave in Congress has crested, that their self-proclaimed revolution has fallen on hard times?

No, not while they remain united when it matters, most of all on budget questions, where the straitjacket they made for themselves in the budget resolution still seems to fit.

The Senate may be a bit less ideological when it gets around to handling spending bills than the House has been. It likes the arts more, for example. But the budget resolution means it cannot vote to spend more in total than the House will.

Even on the issues where they suffered setbacks, the budget offers an alternate route. Republicans may not be able to pass a regulatory bill severe enough to suit them. But they still have a blunt ax to wield -- next week's House vote in which they hope to eliminate 40 percent of the enforcement funds allotted to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Then, should a liberal pessimist, or a conservative optimist, conclude that the Republicans are sure to prevail on an agenda that has a bit less ideological purity?

No, because the big budget reconciliation bill lies ahead, involving Medicare and student loans, taxes and perhaps welfare. And that is not just a fight in Congress, where the rules make it easier to pass than most bills, but a battle with President Clinton, if he sticks to his veto threats.

As Speaker Newt Gingrich said in a telephone interview on Friday, the short-term question is this, "Faced with a lot of problems, can we find a way to get our act together well enough to stumble through the rest of the summer, get a little rest and take on reconciliation in September and October, and perhaps November and December, and get enough signed into law so that somebody from Washington can be nominated, like Dole or Gramm?"

On lesser issues, like the regulatory bill that seemed deadlocked, it was too early to quit. He said, "When you have revolutions you never give up. You keep looking for pressure points to break through." Republicans know that, he said, but that still leaves the question: "Can our core team pull itself together again and again?"

Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, walked into the ornate Speaker's lobby between House votes one day recently to say that the rest of the session would be more difficult than the beginning, "when we deliberately selected issues on which we were virtually unanimous."

Mr. Hyde, who has sometimes chafed at the pace demanded of his committee, said "There are many potholes and ditches ahead." The forthcoming issues were ones on which "a comfortable consensus can't be reached in a hurry."

But, he said: "At the end of the day, there has to be a coming together. That is a function of leadership." He said Representative Dick Armey of Texas, who as majority leader handles most tactical issues for Mr. Gingrich, had succeeded in "imposing genteel discipline" in which he hears everyone out and then reminds them, "Our majority status can be jeopardized if we fractionalize."

The difficulties Republicans have had and still face fall into two categories:

One is the hesitant-to-immobile nature of the Senate, changed a bit but still recognizable from the description offered 38 years ago by William S. White as "an institution that lives in an unending yesterday where the past is never gone, the present never quite decisive and the future rarely quite visible." The Senate does not do anything quickly, and its pace limits the number of major issues any Congress can tackle. One reason not to push a new, complicated issue like affirmative action is that the Senate does not have the time for it.

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The second is that the Republicans, though cohesive, are not monolithic, and their majorities are not so big that they can disregard their dissenters, especially against the kind of opposition that Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader, has forged in the Senate.

The Legal Services Corporation's likely survival is a reflection of that second circumstance. Despite the Christian Right's complaints that the corporation was anti-family for helping the poor get divorces, enough Republicans seem to think there is a conservative value in showing the poor that the legal system can help them to keep the agency going.

The limits of that dissent, however, have been marked sharply by the budget resolution. With its spending limits in place, said Senator Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, "There really isn't much room for philosophical differences between House Republicans and Senate Republicans."

The Senate's pace and moderation certainly frustrate many House Republicans today. But they always annoy the House majority, and last year the Democrats grumbled. For, as Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, chairman of the Republican caucus, put it between regulatory votes, "The Senate is not able to operate in lockstep with a simple majority."

Mr. Wicker, calling from the Republican cloakroom late Thursday night between appropriations votes, said "There is a frustration among freshmen house members about the Senate's lack of progress." But he said they understood "that's the way the Constitution was written 200 years ago. They are designed to make the process more deliberative and slow things down."

Mr. Gingrich, on the phone from California where he was to make a speech at the Ronald Reagan library on the Republicans' future, said he felt the Senate has "got a lot done," and worked more cooperatively than some might have expected. He cited the fact that the Senate Finance Committee staff was sitting in with House Republicans as they worked out their Medicare plans. And he chuckled about impatient freshmen; some regarded him and Mr. Armey "as the squishers, that we don't quite really get the revolution."

Senators like Mr. Cochran argue that the Senate has joined with the House in the most important of all actions so far, the budget resolution aimed at balancing the budget in seven years. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, head of the Republican Senate Republican Policy Committee, said "It can be very frustrating here, but overall we are marching ahead on a very significant agenda."

And third-term Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who heads the House Republican caucus, said "The Senate has come along further, quite frankly, than many of us expected at the beginning of the year. At first, for example, we were not going to have a tax cut in the Senate, but in the end we did."

Well, not yet.

For a tax cut to happen, the reconciliation bill has to become law. Mr. Nickles concedes that is "going to be tough." Mr. Cochran points out that even if Congress generally understands the need to cut, "all programs have somebody who's for them, saying 'Don't cut that. That's important.' " He said he had said it himself occasionally.

Reconciliation is where Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House minority leader, says he thinks the Republicans will fail and perhaps fall apart. "I think the wave is cresting," he said. "The real test of this two years is what happens with this reconciliation bill. Can they cut student loans, farm programs and give a tax break that is canted toward the people that don't need one?" He said he thought rank-and-file Republican tolerance for following orders "is wearing thin."

Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th argued that the Republicans failed when they overreached. The West Virginia Democrat argued that the regulatory bill had failed because "They just had to make it too extreme." But he said he expected Republicans to push ahead with cutting Medicare. "They are disciplined. They have their fervor," he said. "They don't have that many places to go unless they want to give up their tax cut, which I don't think they want to do."

Mr. Gingrich also agreed on the critical role of Medicare, saying "The extraordinary question is: 'Can we in fact roll out a product line that people can say is really a good deal, that seniors really have a good choice? Or will it be seen as an assault on seniors?' So far at least, we are holding our own."

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 1995, on Page 1001018 of the National edition with the headline: Congressional Memo; After Bad Week, G.O.P. Looks to Budget for Help. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe